Four influential books were published in the first quarter of the 18th century which highlighted the simplicity and purity of classical architecture: Vitruvius Britannicus by Colen Campbell (1715), Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura (The Four Books of Architecture, 1715), De re aedificatoria by Leon Battista Alberti (first published in 1452) and The Designs of Inigo Jones... with Some Additional Designs (1727).

In 1734, William Kent and Lord Burlington designed one of England's finest examples of Palladian architecture, Holkham Hall in Norfolk.

An early centre of neoclassicism was Italy, especially Naples, where by the 1730s court architects such as Luigi Vanvitelli and Ferdinando Fuga were recovering classical, Palladian and Mannerist forms in their Baroque architecture.

On Jadot's lead, an original neoclassical style was developed by Gaspare Maria Paoletti, transforming Florence into the most important centre of neoclassicism in the peninsula.

In France, the movement was propelled by a generation of French art students trained in Rome, and was influenced by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

International neoclassical architecture was exemplified in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's buildings, especially the Altes Museum in Berlin, Sir John Soane's Bank of England in London and the newly built White House and Capitol in Washington, D.C. of the nascent American Republic.

These had begun in the late 1740s, but only achieved a wide audience in the 1760s, with the first luxurious volumes of tightly controlled distribution of Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (The Antiquities of Herculaneum Exposed).

Techniques employed in the style included flatter, lighter motifs, sculpted in low frieze-like relief or painted in monotones en camaïeu ("like cameos"), isolated medallions or vases or busts or bucrania or other motifs, suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon, with slender arabesques against backgrounds, perhaps, of "Pompeiian red" or pale tints, or stone colours.

[8] A new phase in neoclassical design was inaugurated by Robert and James Adam, who travelled in Italy and Dalmatia in the 1750s, observing the ruins of the classical world.

The Adam brothers aimed to simplify the Rococo and Baroque styles which had been fashionable in the preceding decades, to bring what they felt to be a lighter and more elegant feel to Georgian houses.

There was little direct knowledge of surviving Greek buildings before the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, when an expedition funded by the Society of Dilettanti in 1751 and led by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett began serious archaeological enquiry.

Stuart was commissioned after his return from Greece by George Lyttelton to produce the first Greek building in England, the garden temple at Hagley Hall (1758–59).

[10] Seen in its wider social context, Greek Revival architecture sounded a new note of sobriety and restraint in public buildings in Britain around 1800 as an assertion of nationalism attendant on the Act of Union, the Napoleonic Wars, and the clamour for political reform.

It was to be William Wilkins's winning design for the public competition for Downing College, Cambridge, that announced the Greek style was to be the dominant idiom in architecture.

According to the art historian Hugh Honour "so far from being, as is sometimes supposed, the culmination of the Neo-classical movement, the Empire marks its rapid decline and transformation back once more into a mere antique revival, drained of all the high-minded ideas and force of conviction that had inspired its masterpieces".

James 'Athenian' Stuart's work The Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece was very influential in this regard, as were Robert Wood's Palmyra and Baalbec.

In Scotland and the north of England, where the Gothic Revival was less strong, architects continued to develop the neoclassical style of William Henry Playfair.

For Athens, the first King of Greece, Otto I, commissioned the architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert to design a modern city plan.

Also the work of a French architect, Jean-Charles-Alexandre Moreau, is the garden façade of the Esterházy Palace (1797–1805) in Kismarton (today Eisenstadt in Austria).

Other 19th-century neoclassical buildings include the Monument to Sir Alexander Ball (1810), RNH Bighi (1832), St Paul's Pro-Cathedral (1844), the Rotunda of Mosta (1860) and the now-destroyed Royal Opera House, Valletta (1866).

Neoclassicism in Mexican architecture was directly linked to crown policies that sought to rein in the exuberance of the New Spanish Baroque, and to create public buildings of "good taste" funded by the crown, such as the Palacio de Minería in Mexico City, the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, and the Alhóndiga de Granaditas in Guanajuato, all built in the late colonial era.

The Neoclassical style arrived in the American empires of Spain and Portugal through projects designed in Europe or carried out locally by European or Criollo architects trained in the academies of the metropolis.

There are also examples of the adaptation to the local architectural language, which during previous centuries had made a synthesis or syncretism of European and pre-Columbian elements in the so-called Colonial Baroque.

Two more Classical criteria belong, in Chile, the La Moneda Palace (1784–1805) and the Santiago Metropolitan Cathedral (1748–1899), both works by the Italian architect Joaquín Toesca.

The centre of Polish-Lithuanian Neoclassicism was Warsaw and Vilnius under the rule of the last Polish king and Lithuanian grand duke, Stanisław August Poniatowski.

Catherine the Great adopted the style during her reign by allowing the architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe to build the Old Hermitage and the Imperial Academy of Arts.

He also designed several summer houses for the kings in El Escorial and Aranjuez and reconstructed the Plaza Mayor, Madrid, among other important works.

In the new republic, Robert Adam's neoclassical manner was adapted for the local late 18th- and early 19th-century style, called Federal architecture.

One of the pioneers of this style was the English-born Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who is often noted as one of America's first formally trained professional architects and the father of American architecture.

^ Guagliumi, Silvia (2014), "La Villa Archinto a Monza.Analogie con alcuni esempi d'architettura neoclassica in Lombardia", Silvia editrice (ISBN 978-88-96036-62-4), basata sulla propria Tesi di Laurea in Architettura presso il Politecnico di Milano discussa nell'anno accademico 1982/'83 con Relatore il Prof.Arch.C.Perogalli.